Planned Parenthood has hired a high-profile crisis communication firm to help it deal with fallout from a series of undercover sting videos produced by the Center for Medical Progress. Politico reports that PP has hired SKDKnickerbocker, a firm which features former Obama communications staffer Anita Dunn as a managing director. Dunn is perhaps best known for a speech she gave extolling the political philosophy of communist revolutionary Mao Zedong. On its website, SKDKnickerbocker touts its expertise in crisis communications in Washington and on Wall Street. “By working with a company’s existing corporate communications resources or creating a separate ‘war room,’...

I read with great interest an article by Republican Rep. Devin Nunes about the real cause of the water shortages in California. In the summer of 2002, shortly before I was elected to Congress, I sat through an eye-opening meeting with representatives from the Natural Resources Defense Council... they told me something astonishing: Their goal was to remove 1.3 million acres of farmland from production. They showed me maps that laid out their whole plan: From Merced all the way down to Bakersfield, and on the entire west side of the Valley as well as part of the east side,...

(CNSNews.com) - Testifying in the U.S Senate yesterday, Congressional Budget Office Director Keith Hall warned that the publicly held debt of the U.S. government, when measured as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product, is headed toward a level the United States has seen only once in its history—at the end of World War II. To simply keep the debt at the high historical level where it currently sits—74 percent of GDP--would require either significant increases in federal tax revenue or decreases in non-interest federal spending (or a combination of the two). Historically, U.S. government debt as a percentage of GDP...

China looks like it is heading for its version of the 1929 stock market crash While all Western eyes remain firmly focused on Greece, a potentially much more significant financial crisis is developing on the other side of world. In some quarters, it’s already being called China’s 1929 – the year of the most infamous stock market crash in history and the start of the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression. In any normal summer, a 30pc fall in the Chinese stock market – a loss of value roughly equivalent to the UK’s entire economic output last year – after...

The population of Greece is slightly less than the state of Ohio's, while its gross domestic product is just a little bit bigger than the economies of Kazakhstan, Algeria and Qatar. Instead of focusing on Athens, investors should be much more worried about what's going on in China. You know, that country with about 1.4 billion people and the world's second largest GDP? The Shanghai Composite and Shenzhen Composite have both plunged about 30% from their highs due to legitimate concerns that Chinese stocks are in a bubble. China's government is taking steps to try and minimize any more pain...

Greece has a lot of problems right now as a result of the debt crisis, but one that you might not have immediately anticipated is that online services that require credit or debit payments to a foreign company are broken. As BuzzFeed reports, the Greek government’s imposition of capital controls – which restrict citizens’ ability to take money out of the country – following its failure to make debt repayment, also mean they can’t buy a €0.99 song from iTunes or grab new apps. Of course, it’s not the biggest issue faced by the country, but it is another source...

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation

... Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras spoke by phone with Mr. Juncker and European Parliament President Martin Schulz and asked for help getting an extension to the bailout, a Greek government official said. “The Greek prime minister [Tsipras]expressed the position that the democratic expression of the Greek people is hindered by the closure of banks, which doesn’t apply with the democratic tradition of Europe,” the official said. ... Mr. Tsipras and his government are calling on Greeks to vote “no” to send a signal to Europe and the IMF

The Greek tragedy is reaching its climax. The discussions between Greece and its European creditors broke down over the weekend, with the two sides still at an impasse. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras balked at deeper austerity cuts to the Greek economy, cuts that are a prerequisite for further help from Berlin and Brussels. As a result, Greece is approaching the precipice. With a massive debt payment due on June 30 to the IMF, Greece could default. The extent of the fallout is anybody’s guess, but Greece could see the value of its bonds plummet, putting its banks in crisis,...

“First, widening inequality is a very long-term trend, one that has been decades in the making. The degree of inequality we see today is primarily the result of deep structural changes in our economy that have taken place over many years, including globalization, technological progress, demographic trends, and institutional change in the labor market and elsewhere. By comparison to the influence of these long-term factors, the effects of monetary policy on inequality are almost certainly modest and transient.” That’s what Blogger Ben Bernanke (who is of course distinct from PIMCO advisor Ben and Citadel co-conspirator Ben) had to say earlier...

<p>LONDON — The European Union on Monday approved the use of military force to take on migrant smugglers in the Mediterranean, significantly escalating Europe’s response to a crisis that has left at least 1,800 people dead this year.</p>
<p>The decision allows European governments to move ahead with plans for a naval operation that has been taking shape for weeks and that officials say is crucial to any attempt to confront the burgeoning tide of smuggler vessels ferrying migrants from North ­Africa to Europe.</p>

Ah: I see that there was a Twitter exchange among Brad DeLong, James Pethokoukis, and others over why Republicans don’t acknowledge that Ben Bernanke helped the economy, and claim credit. Pethokoukis — who presumably gets to talk to quite a few Republicans from his perch at AEI — offers a fairly amazing explanation: B/c many view BB as enabling Obama’s spending and artificially propping up debt-heavy economy in need of Mellon-esque liquidation Yep: that dastardly Bernanke was preventing us from having a financial crisis, curse him. Actually, there’s a lot of evidence that this was an important part of the...

The Chicago Public Schools — already facing a federal criminal investigation of its CEO and a projected $1.1 billion budget deficit next school year — now must pay a price for those problems through higher interest rates on a new $300 million bond deal. The rates lured investors to buy the bonds, which CPS says it will use to pay off recently completed construction projects. But they also mean Chicago taxpayers will pay more over the life of the borrowing deal, financial analysts said Wednesday. The main bond issue — for $280 million to be repaid over 25 years —...

It's been five years since BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and released 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Environmentalists are highlighting the disaster by pointing to the 800,000 birds that have died because of the spill in the five years since the disaster, but activists have been eerily silent about the fact that way more birds have been killed by wind turbines — a supposedly “eco-friendly” energy source.The liberal blog Mother Jones reports that 800,000 birds have been killed and the Pelican population in the Gulf has decreased 12 percent. While the 2010 Gulf spill was...

Saudi-led air strikes have failed to reverse the rebels' momentum Houthi militia inched closer Sunday to capturing the port city of Aden, where Saudi-backed forces loyal to Yemeni President Abdel Rabbo Mansour Hadi continue to hold out. The Shi‘ite rebels unleashed artillery barrages on residential areas in the city and targeted a pro-Hadi television station with mortar rounds, forcing it off the air, reports AFP. “There are bodies in the streets, and we can’t get close because there are Houthi snipers on the rooftops. Anything that gets near, they shoot at,” an unidentified medic told Reuters. Houthi militants continue to...

I've just about given up on America. My hope is to teach my kids so they can maintain decency in an evil world. We're educating them, teaching them about God, decency, Western culture, beauty, and truth. My fear is they'll inherit an Idiocracy at best, and a Satanic theocracy at worst. We're on the road to both. God will not be surprised by it either way. Nothing in the political process gives me any hope. Nothing. Not even Ted Cruz because he still has faith in the political system. Even when he gets bounced out of the primary by the...

Moody’s Investors Service on Friday announced it had reduced its rating on Chicago Board of Education debt to one level above junk bond status. Moody’s downgraded the rating to Baa3 from Baa1 on the board’s general obligation debt. That rating applies to a total of $6.3 billion in outstanding debt held by Chicago Public Schools. That lowered rating, according to Moody’s, “reflects CPS’s continued reliance” on its reserves to cover ongoing operating expenditures, “particularly pension contributions, which will steadily increase in the coming years.” ... the lowered CPS rating also takes into account the city’s own credit rating, which also...

In 2008, the nation entered into a financial crisis widely believed to have been caused by excesses in the residential mortgage industry. By 2010, the nation thought it had put in place a series of measures that not only would resolve the crisis but would insure that it never happened again. Yet, here we are in 2015 looking at another potential mortgage crisis. Only this time it is different. In 2008, funds flowed in waves into the mortgage industry. In 2015, it appears the funds are drying up. The solutions to the problem in 2010 and thereafter included: Suing and...

5 years into the euro zone crisis the ECB announces a €1.1 trillion quantitative easing programme to boost economy. Bolder than expected. Draghi Commits ECB to Trillion-Euro Asset-Purchase Plan to Fight Deflation Mario Draghi led the European Central Bank into a new era, committing to a quantitative easing program worth at least 1.1 trillion euros ($1.3 trillion) to counter the threat of a deflationary spiral. The ECB president shrugged off determined opposition led by German officials with a pledge to buy 60 billion euros every month through September next year in a once-and-for-all push to put more cash into circulation...

Over the coming months, I believe we could see an economic meltdown at least six times the size of the 2007 subprime mortgage meltdown... The next financial collapse, already on our radar screen, will not come from hedge funds or home mortgages. It will come from junk bonds, especially energy-related and emerging-market corporate debt. The Financial Times recently estimated that the total amount of energy-related corporate debt issued from 2009-2014 for exploration and development is over $5 trillion. Meanwhile, the Bank for International Settlements recently estimated that the total amount of emerging-market dollar-denominated corporate debt is over $9 trillion. Energy-sector...

When it comes to student debt, it's not fair to blame students for being in over their heads. In the first of its reports (April 2014), the BCEP concluded that not only is the price tag for governmental student loan relief programs much higher than originally thought, but their existence presents an irresistible temptation for students to “engage in more risky behavior because they don’t have to bear the full cost of their actions.” As such, the center urges policymakers to eliminate the forgiveness portions of the various relief programs to “reduce the potential for over-borrowing by requiring borrowers to...

The constitutional issues involving President Barack Obama's executive orders on amnesty far transcend the issue of illegal immigration. The president’s action strikes at the very heart of our separation of powers. The Constitution reserves to Congress alone the power to enact and alter law, and charges the president with the responsibility to faithfully execute those laws. If the president can seize legislative power in this manner and then boast to an audience that he himself has changed the law, then the separation of powers becomes meaningless, and our constitutional Republic will have crossed a very bright line that separates a...

The Mexican Revolution, which began on November 20, 1910, and continued for a decade, is recognized as the first major political, social, and cultural revolution of the 20th century. The United States, Mexico’s northern neighbor, was significantly affected by the human dislocation that resulted: if someone did not want to fight, the only alternative was to leave the country—and over 890,000 Mexicans did just that by legally emigrating during the second decade of the 20th century….

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 03, 2014 The German magazine Stimme des Glaubens reported years ago that Pope John Paul II had commented on the Third Secret of Fatima during a conference in Fulda, Germany in 1980. In this report, Pope John Paul II said, "...it should be sufficient for all Christians to know this: if there is a message in which it is written that the oceans will flood whole areas of the earth, and that from one moment to the next millions of people will perish, truly the publication of such a message is no longer something to be so much...

The short-attention span generation has birthed the shiny-object election. The theme of the 2014 midterms — to whatever extent one is discernable — has been an explosion of one crisis after another, each of which demands an enormous amount of media attention before fading for the next one. From the Secret Service to ISIS, Ebola to immigration, mistreated veterans to Ferguson and race relations, candidates and the president have been forced to react to the controversy du jour. Strategists and experts say the result has been bad news for Democrats, who have had a tougher time underscoring their preferred campaign...

Nigeria has been declared officially free of Ebola after six weeks with no new cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) says. WHO representative Rui Gama Vaz, speaking in the capital Abuja, said it was a "spectacular success story". Nigeria won praise for its swift response after a Liberian diplomat brought the disease there in July. The outbreak has killed more than 4,500 people in West Africa, mostly in Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone. An estimated 70% of those infected have died in those countries. The WHO officially declared Senegal Ebola-free on Friday. Meanwhile, European Union foreign ministers are meeting in...

News about the spread of the Ebola virus has been an increasing focus for market participants in recent days. Despite rising media coverage, Ebola seems to have had little discernible effect on consumer sentiment to date. However, as Goldman Sachs notes, the "fear factor" associated with Ebola appears more significant than in past instances of pandemic concern. While expert opinion sees the likelihood of a significant outbreak of Ebola in the US as very low, it is likely any negative macroeconomic consequences are most likely to be transmitted through fear or risk-aversion channels.

In an open letter to Saudi ministers posted via Twitter, Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al-Saud expressed his “astonishment” at comments made by Ali al-Naimi, the oil minister, who reportedly played down the impact of oil prices falling below $100 a barrel. Prices have since fallen below $88 a barrel, or a quarter since June. Prince Alwaleed, noting the kingdom’s 2014 budget was 90 per cent dependent on oil revenues, said belittling the impact of lower prices was a “catastrophe that cannot go unmentioned”.

The signs of the times as read by the Roger Cohen of New York Times at least in his piece The Great Unraveling throw shadows upon a doubtful scene. He surveys our age and writes, “it was a time of beheadings. … a time of aggression. … a time of breakup. … a time of weakness…. a time of hatred. … a time of fever. … a time of disorientation.” And yet they had come to that pass sleep-walking, unmindful “until it was too late and people could see the Great Unraveling for what it was and what it had...

With international crises boiling on three continents, it is easy to think that things could not possibly get any worse. But, of course, they can, and that proposition is being tested presently in Pakistan where anti-government protests area growing more aggressive.300 were injured in overnight battles with government forces on Saturday night into Sunday morning. Demonstrations by Pakistanis loyal to opposition politician Imran Khan and cleric Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri that began two weeks ago became more violent this weekend as police used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds. The protest movement has been camped outside of Pakistan’s parliament...

Via Facebook: No Drama Obama’s Summer Casual Agenda for America (or What He Didn’t Do On My Summer Vacation)There is absolutely nothing important going on in the world right now.There are no security threats, no worldwide turmoil affecting America’s interests, no civil war in Syria, South Sudan, or Libya. No war on our ally, Israel. No Ebola epidemic devastating West Africa and spreading. No race riots tearing apart a whole community in Missouri. No Russian aggression in Ukraine. No deranged North Korean dictator testing more missiles. No Chinese jets getting up close and personal with our American military. No brave American...

Unlike most American presidents, Barack Obama took his inaugural oath of office twice, the latter affirmation serving as a private belt-and-braces remedy to a verbal mistake, the former as the usual public spectacle. Four years later, he repeated the trick, promising fealty first during an exclusive White House ceremony, and then, a day later, before the nation at large. Thus did our 44th president bring to a remarkable four the number of times that he had solemnly sworn to faithfully execute the Office, and, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United...

Tyler Durden 08/26/2014 After spending time in Argentina, BofA's Marcos Buscaglia is concerned... The perception of many locals is that the risks of an economic/currency crisis before year-end have increased significantly. This compares to a view they had before of a muddle-through till the 2015 presidential elections. Policy decision-making is ever more concentrated, and the administration has radicalized, but the severe economic downturn will change political incentives in 2015, in BofA's view. With the official peso rate at record lows once again, the black-market Dolar-Blue tumbled to over 14/USD - a record low indicating dramatic devaluation ahead (which of course,...

There’s something darkly coincidental in the fact that the latest weapon to be deployed against the survival instinct of both Israel and the United States is an alleged “heartlessness” when it comes to children. The people of Israel are castigated in news media, social media and the “international community” (read: the scoundrel United Nations, of whose budget U.S. taxpayers pay 22 percent) as lacking in “humanity” itself. Why? Because as the IDF fights to end Gaza’s endless rocket barrages against Israel, many children under the age of 18 number among the civilian dead. This London Telegraph headline is not...

The leader of the Kurds in Iraq has pleaded for arms shipments to fend off onslaught from extremist Islamic State (IS) militia, who are accused of burying women and children alive. United States officials have warned IS is a direct threat to the US, and other western nations, and is more powerful now than Al Qaeda was when it struck the US on September 11, 2001. The US forces have continued airstrikes against IS targets in northern Iraq as political friends and foes criticise president Barack Obama's decision to limit American action in the country.

Dead bodies of illegal immigrants are turning up in south Texas as Central Americans pour across the U.S.-Mexico border, and a veterinarian who ranches cattle 70 miles from ground zero has the photos to prove it. Dr. Mike 'Doc' Vickers of Brooks County, Texas showed some of the grisly images to MailOnline, all of them far too grotesque to publish unedited. One picture shows a corpse propped up against a tree near his ranch in Brooks County, his eyes missing and dried blood cascading down his shirtless body. 'This guy, obviously, had to lay down up against that tree, and...

Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst (R) reported that the vast majority of illegal immigrants coming over the southern border are not unaccompanied minors in an appearance on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “The Daily Rundown.” “Our effort in Texas is not focused on the unaccompanied children...we are focused on-the unaccompanied children represent some 12%-20%. We're focused on that 80, the 85% of which a quarter according to the border patrol, have a criminal record” he said ...

A local home for children has been asked by the federal government to prepare itself to take in unaccompanied immigrant children from Central America who continue to cross over into the United States. The United Methodist Home for Children in Mechanicsburg has not taken in any children from Central America yet, and it continues to assist children sent to it from the local county courts systems, the group's Board of Trustees Chairwoman Karen Best said Monday. But the agency has been contacted to prepare itself to provide shelter and care for unaccompanied minors, she said. The home has been approved...

The Washington Post-ABC News poll reveals that 58 percent of Americans, including 54 percent of Latinos, are disappointed with his policies on the surge of thousands of undocumented immigrants, many of them children, across the southern border. Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/poll-Obama-immigration-children/2014/07/16/id/582962#ixzz37dmNzdPV Urgent: Should Obamacare Be Repealed? Vote Here Now!

Several key empirical facts do not lend credibility to the White House claim of a “surprise crisis”. Actually quite the opposite – But to really absorb the issue we must analyze current year events through the reality of prior events; we must look into the way-back machine. To that end we have read the entirety of: A March 2014 Final Report from the National Center For Border Security – HERE A June 2014 (Declassified) Intelligence Report on UAC’s and Central America – HERE A June 2014 Congressional Research Report analyzing the prior four years of Central American UAC’s (Unaccompanied Alien...

While Obama is spreading 65,000 illegal alien children most of whom have serious communicable diseases around the country, where are the thousands of health agencies around the country trying to fight this massive injection of disease into this country?

More than 52,000 unaccompanied children have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border since October. Here's a look at why it's happening and how authorities and communities are coping: When did the crisis start? The Department of Homeland Security said the uptick in unaccompanied minors crossing the border began last year but accelerated in the last few months. Since October, more than 52,000 children traveling without an adult were caught entering the United States through Mexico — double the number of the previous year and triple the number in 2011. **SNIP** How do they get to the U.S.? They travel by bus, train,...

**SNIP** Drug-resistant tuberculosis also appears to have spread, with several counties in southern Texas reporting twice the usual average number of cases. TB is a disease that needs to be carefully monitored and screened for, a prospect that is not possible under the current circumstances. Dengue fever, a potentially deadly mosquito-borne disease that causes fatigue, pain in the bones and muscles, and fever, and infects close to 100 million people worldwide every year, has been detected this year in southern Texas for the first time since 2005. Illegal immigrants, possibly from Mexico, are a likely source. If infected mosquitoes begin...

As Ukrainian protesters rallied against the Kremlin-backed government, were killed by government forces and weathered a subsequent Russian invasion, President Obama left it up to Vice President Joe Biden to directly communicate with the Ukrainian government. Obama even went so far as a skip a national security meeting on the Russian invasion at the beginning of March, which Biden joined via teleconference. Now, it appears that foreign policy methodology is playing out again in Iraq. Last night, the White House announced that Biden had jumped on the phone with Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan “regarding the security situation around Mosul, Iraq,...

Islamist insurgents in Iraq have seized the city of Tikrit, their second major gain after capturing Mosul on Tuesday, security officials say. Tikrit, the hometown of former leader Saddam Hussein, lies just 150km (95 miles) north of the capital Baghdad. Iraqi PM Nouri Maliki vowed to fight back against the jihadists and punish those in the security forces who fled, offering little or no resistance. The insurgents are from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). ISIS, which is also known as ISIL, is an offshoot of al-Qaeda. It controls considerable territory in eastern Syria and western and...

Seeking reliable backup communication in a crisis, emergency managers are finding new solutions in an old technology: ham radio. “It’s just another avenue, another opportunity for us to be able to communicate,” said Herb Schraufnagel, public safety captain with Emory University Hospital Midtown. Emory HealthCare is among a growing number of hospital systems to adopt ham radio. Hospital administrators and government officials took a lesson from Hurricane Katrina, which left some Gulf Coast medical centers isolated from the outside world, as landlines and cell towers failed. …